What We Think We Know about Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6

More of the Music of Ludwig van Beethoven

In our opinion this is the best sounding Beethoven 6th Symphony ever recorded. It is the most beautiful of them all, and has long been my personal favorite of the nine Beethoven composed.

Ansermet’s performance is clearly definitive to my ear as well. The gorgeous hall the Suisse Romande recorded in was possibly the best recording venue of its day, possibly of all time; more amazing sounding recordings were made there than any other hall we know of.

There is a richness to the sound that exceeds all others, yet clarity and transparency are not sacrificed in the least.

It’s as wide, deep and three-dimensional as any, which is of course all to the good, but what makes the sound of these recordings so special is the weight and power of the brass and the timbral accuracy of the instruments in every section.

We have a section of classical recordings that we nominate for the best performances with top quality sound, and this record is of course one of its founding members.

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B.B. King – Lucille

More Electric Blues

  • Boasting solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER throughout, you’ll have a hard time finding a Lucille (the album, not the guitar) that sounds remotely as good as this vintage Bluesway pressing – impossibly quiet vinyl too, the quietest we’ve come across in twenty years of doing shootouts for this title
  • An exceptionally hard album to find with good sound, but here it is – clean, clear and spacious with a solid bottom end – qualities that bring out the best in B.B.’s Blues
  • It has taken us years to find clean copies with the right stampers for Lucille, but finally our efforts have paid off with this knockout Hot Stamper
  • “The soulful empowerment that comes from Lucille resonates vocally from Mr. King and the signature vibrato and trill of the guitar’s namesake. The album itself is a dedication to thick, yet airy blues filled with quirk and real-world relatives, staying thoroughly intimate through its production. At thirty-seven minutes, the nine-tracked record isn’t a lengthy export, but its replay value is priceless.”
  • If you’re a fan of the Mr. King, this vintage pressing of his 1968 classic surely belongs in your collection
  • The complete list of titles from 1968 that we’ve auditioned to date can be found here. As of 2026, there are about 100 or so reviews for them, most of them describing the better copies from our shootouts
  • We don’t mess around. We play all the clean copies of good titles that we can get our hands on. It’s the only way to find the hi-fidelity recordings that actually sound good — they’re the ones that were mastered and pressed properly — and you have to clean them and play them to have any hope of figuring out which are which.
  • Everything else is a guess, and we prefer not to guess. We want to know.

Lucille is by far the toughest 60s B.B. King record to find these days in audiophile playing condition. Most copies are just beat, and the ones that aren’t tend to be rare and pricey. The reason for all of the above is simple enough: it’s one of the man’s most consistently enjoyable, best sounding albums. Who can blame people for playing it to death when the music is so good?

Mobile Fidelity remastered the record in the 90s for their consistently awful Anadisq series on Heavy Vinyl, and we used to sell it, albeit somewhat reluctantly. It’s not nearly as bad as most of their catalog from the period, but I would it goes without saying that our Hot Stamper pressing will show you a Lucille that a Heavy Vinyl pressing or Half-Speed can only hint at.

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Not My Thing, But Maybe Yours?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Miles Davis Available Now

The staff may or may not like these kinds of records, but I sure don’t. To be honest, Bitches Brew fits just fine into a section I like to call “albums I can live without.” The world is full of them.

Music is deeply personal. If you don’t feel the need to like what other people like, you and I should get along just fine.

I remember buying this record in high school and having a devil of a time trying to make any sense of it. Columbia records felt the same way and almost refused to release it. I still don’t get the appeal.

I had bought the first two Weather Report albums around the same time and had had a hell of a time with those too. But then  Sweetnighter came out, which was angular but still accessible, and the scales fell from my eyes, the heavens opened up and the music finally started to make sense to me. Soon enough I was a big fan of that album, but never did warm to Bitches Brew I have to say.

This is music for those who want to be challenged. That’s as true today as it was 50+ years ago when the record came out.

I still don’t care for it though. In my defense, allow me to fall back on the wisdom of de gustibus non est disputandum.

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Breezin’ – “Hot Stamper” MoFi Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of George Benson Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Having heard so many good sounding copies of this album, it is unlikely we would find much to like on the MoFi. But we did a long time ago, after cleaning and playing three MoFi copies, two of which were awful.

Sonic Grade: B-

Another MoFi reviewed, and surprisingly this one isn’t awful.

It has an excellent side two backed with a pretty good side one.

Side two has excellent bass — for a MoFi — and lots of energy — for a MoFi.

It’s slightly smooth, but overall it’s very musical. The best domestic copies are going to eat its lunch, but try to find one that sounds good. Most of them are awful. 

This MoFi copy, though lacking in many ways, is much better sounding than the other MoFi copies we played it against, which were muddy and compressed.

Side one of this copy has some of that sound. Side one lacks the transients we found on other copies and it’s a tad recessed and compressed. However, it does have relatively good bass definition and the strings are nicely textured.

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Johnny Cash – At San Quentin

More of the Music of Johnny Cash

  • Here is an original Columbia 360 pressing of Cash’s legendary live album with solid Double Plus (A++) grades from top to bottom
  • What made these sides really stand out from the pack was their combination of richness and clarity – take it from us, it’s not easy to find a pressing that gives you both the way this one does
  • Forget the 70s reissues and whatever dead-on-arrival Heavy Vinyl record they’re making these days – if you want to hear the Tubey Magical you-are-there immediacy of Johnny Cash live in concert, this is the only way to do it
  • So many great songs: “Wanted Man,” “I Walk the Line,” “San Quentin,” “A Boy Named Sue,” “Folsom Prison Blues” and more
  • If you only have one Johnny Cash album, wouldn’t it have to be this one?
  • 5 stars: “…listen to ‘A Boy Named Sue,’ … rescued by the wild-eyed, committed performance by Cash, where it sounds like he really was set on murdering that son of a bitch who named him Sue. He sounds that way throughout the record…”

We had a blast listening to this album. Cash’s banter between the songs is practically as good as the music itself!

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What to Listen For on Queen’s The Game

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Queen Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Years ago we wrote:

The best sounding side ones were rarely as good as the best sounding side twos.

Not sure if that’s still true but you can check your own copy and see how the two sides compare.

Here some other records that often display side to side differences.

Our Old Commentary

Even the good side ones tended to have a trace of harmonic distortion and compression that is simply nowhere to be found on the good side twos. How and why this is we have no idea. Since every copy had the same sonic issues, we discounted it in our grading.

Only the better copies bring the hits on side one to life and give them the size and power we know they can have.

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Five Major Problem Areas in Audio

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Prokofiev Available Now

UPDATE 2026

There was a time, perhaps ten years ago, that many EMI pressings finally started to sound a lot better to us than they had in the early- to mid-2000s when this commentary was written.

(2007 was the year everything changed, but it wasn’t 2007 yet. After being deep into audio for close to thirty years, it wasn’t until a few years later that we learned we still had a long way to go.)

Nowadays we can say that we are proud to offer some truly outstanding recordings conducted by Previn, Fremaux and others for EMI.

What to listen for on this album?

That’s easy: The all-too-common 70s EMI harshness and shrillness.

We could never understand why audiophiles revered EMI the way they did back in the 70s. Harry Pearson loved many of their recordings, but I sure didn’t. 

The longer I stay in this hobby, the more clear it becomes that many of the records on the TAS list are better suited to the old school audio equipment of the 60s rather than the modern approach to audio that is possible today thanks to the many revolutionary changes to every aspect of music reproduction that have come along in the last thirty years or so.

(Obviously there are plenty of audio systems from every era that, for all appearances, seem unlikely to reproduce music well, which goes a long way in explaining most of the rampant enthusiasm for the modern Heavy Vinyl pressing.)

These kinds of records used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know, I had an old school stereo even into the 90s. Some of the records that sounded good to me back then don’t sound too good to me anymore.

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Letter of the Week – “My brain just wasn’t used to having so much more sound coming out of the speakers.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder Available Now

Our good customer Michel wrote to us about his experience playing one of our Hot Stamper pressings of Midnight Blue.

Hi Tom,
I used the first track to compare this Super Hot Stamper pressing I bought to a ’63 original to the Music Matters pressing. This was kind of interesting.

The Music Matters is total junk, as it is completely lifeless. It just has that lifeless audiophile feel. So I’ll just take the MM right out of the equation.

My brain is used to the original pressing’s sound, which is more raw sounding.

The SHS is, simply put,way more of everything!

So much so that I had to turn the gain down… my brain just wasn’t used to having so much more sound coming out of the speakers. The tubeyness factor is way way higher than the original. I eventually acclimated and turned it back up.

The original just has that sound that makes me think of long ago, and it is quite vibrant. Perhaps after some dozen listenings I will put it in the sell pile, but not quite yet.

Very happy to have this amazingly lush sounding LP.

Take Care, Michel

Michel,

It’s hard to imagine that you will be able to listen to the original “ear” pressing a dozen times. We never cared for it. Compared to the later pressings we sell it’s just too crude. (That may be what you actually mean by “raw”.)

Rudy would go on to recut the record much better down the road, and those are, in our experience, unbeatable.

As for Music Matters, most of their records are pretty bad sounding, but no worse than most of what is being marketed to audiophiles these days. Here are some of our reviews and commentaries for their crappy remasters.

Lifeless? Of course it is.

The records being made by the companies operating today have sound that is more often than not dead as a doornail.

It’s positively shameful, especially considering the quality of the original recordings.

Thanks for writing,

Best, TP

Further Reading

Don’t Let the Cover Fool You

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Mendelssohn Available Now

UPDATE 2026

After years of putting it off, we eventually got around to doing a shootout for the album, the results of which you can find here.

Many years ago we had played the record, liked it, and then completely forgotten about it.

Demo disc quality. This record has the same kind of amazing sound as the Chabrier disc on London, but it’s much more rare, perhaps because the cover did not do much to sell the album.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a better Mendelssohn 4th. 

We admit we foolishly did not expect much from a mid-60s London with a cover this plain.

It’s hard to get excited about an album with such a generic cover, but hearing the recording we were forced to confront our silly prejudices and recognize the greatness of James Lock‘s work for Decca in 1965.

It even beats the famous Solti on Blueback, which has a cover to die for (shown below). However, like many of the Londons and Deccas we’ve played over the years, the sound of that pressing is awful.

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Unplugged – Sonic Pros and Cons

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now

The best pressings of this album convey the immediacy of a live show, one which just happens to be fronted by one of the greatest performers and songwriters in the history of popular music, Sir Paul McCartney.

On the best copies, the sound is warmer, richer, and sweeter, or in a word, more ANALOG sounding. You get more extension up top, more weight down low, and more transparency in the midrange.

It’s surprising just how veiled and two-dimensional so many copies sound, considering this is a live recording with not a lot of processing.

As a digital recording, some of that processing is baked into the tape. Unplugged will  never sound as good as this McCartney album, but that’s to be expected.

The bulk of the recordings from 1991 are simply not competitive with those from 1970, not by a long shot. There were hundreds of great records recorded or released in 1970. There are 24 Hot Stamper pressings of them on the site as I write this. I would have a hard time finding even a half-dozen from 1991.

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